ChatGPT Work vs Claude Cowork: which suits your business?

This is what OpenAI and Anthropic each publish about their own agent, read on the same day. No head-to-head test sits behind it, so it tells you what the vendors say rather than how well either performs. Where a vendor's pages say nothing on a point, the cell says so instead of filling the gap, and the numbers in brackets point to the sources at the foot of the page.

If Cowork itself is new to you, start with our plain-English guide to Claude Cowork, which covers what it does and how Anthropic is folding it into one Claude.

I would not choose between these two on features. They do the same job, and what separates them is where they run, how usage is billed and who controls them, so start from the situation below that looks most like yours. Where two apply, your security team's requirements usually settle it.

Neither agent carries a price of its own. You pay for the plan, and the agent spends its usage. ChatGPT Work uses the same pricing, credits and usage limits as Codex [5]. On credit-based business agreements, Work draws from a shared pool of workspace credits, and whether it adds to the invoice depends on the credits left, the contracted rates and the overage setting [6].

OpenAI publishes one illustrative planning example [6]. Among first-time enterprise Work users in marketing, the change in annualised consumed-credit value after employees started using Work was about US$53 per employee a year at the median, US$309 on average and US$1,154 at the 90th percentile. OpenAI says these are directional estimates, annualised from one week of early usage, and not fixed prices or guaranteed changes to an invoice. The gap between the median and the average is the part worth reading: a smaller number of heavy users pulls the average up, and those are the people to watch in a pilot.

The Anthropic pages cited here publish no equivalent figure. Cowork counts toward the plan's usage limits, and longer tasks that search the web, run code or create files use more than a quick question [10]. On Claude Enterprise every token is billed at API rates on top of the seat [13], so the same spread between light and heavy users shows up directly in the bill.

For either vendor, a pilot on your own work is the only estimate I would budget against. Run the same workflow before and after, and record time taken, rework and usage per person.

If the open question is which plan to buy rather than which agent to switch on, our comparison of the ChatGPT and Claude business plans, listed at the end of this page, sets out UK seat prices, controls and data location for each.

Microsoft sells a third option under a similar name. Copilot Cowork is Microsoft's agent inside Microsoft 365 Copilot: it sends email, schedules meetings, creates Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files and posts in Teams, asking for approval before important actions [14]. Microsoft says it built Copilot Cowork working closely with Anthropic, integrating the technology behind Claude Cowork [18], and it can use Anthropic's Claude models as a subprocessor for most of its reasoning [15].

For a firm whose mail, documents and identity already sit in Microsoft 365, that is reason enough to price Copilot Cowork next to the other two. Claude Cowork also connects to Microsoft 365 as one of its connectors [10].

Vendor documentation will not tell you how either agent handles your own work. Give both agents the same real work for two weeks, with a named owner and one question to settle, and collect evidence on each point below. A pilot without a baseline produces opinions, so time the work before either agent touches it.

Setting up and rolling out agents like these is core 1AYM work, for office staff and engineers alike. The hands-on parts of this guide are the parts we do: the two-week pilot, access by group, spend limits and approval settings. The documented case is engagement file D-01, listed below: at a large international marketing agency we hold the lead architect role on its AI platform, contribute engineering to its internal Claude Code skill platform and built its identity and provisioning pipelines.

1AYM is an OpenAI Select Partner, and the Claude certifications on this site belong to our founder personally, not to the company. We build on both vendors' products, so this guide matches an agent to a situation rather than to a vendor, and a pilot result outweighs the partnership.

If buying an agent is still competing with building your own, our AI Opportunity & Feasibility Sprint settles build versus buy and writes the roadmap over a typical two to four weeks. Once the choice is made, a fixed-scope rollout can start within a day of the scope being signed, and a rollout you have already scoped can be resourced on contract from the collective of associates who work with 1AYM, held to the same standard. Book a call from the end of this page, or email tayyeb@1aym.com.